Recent reviews by Larto

Good experience. I fear fish now

Man, this game started off so strong. Gorgeous pixel graphics, comfortable and atmospheric soundtrack, pretty solid metroidvania controls. At the beginning you don't even realize that the map is procedurally generated... I sure didn't! But once you realize it...

You start realizing a certain pattern to each area's general layout that starts feeling uninspired. It rarely feels like an enemy is placed with a specific intention, the way save rooms are spaced out is awkward and frustrating, and memorizing where what is in the map is super difficult, because no place means anything. For contrast: I can today look back at the map of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow and not having played it in years, remember clearly where the Clock Tower is, or what the Underground Reservoir looked like, what challenges the rooms had and how the rooms fit together. That's surely part nostalgia, but the rooms and the challenges were not just "long hallway #4", "unpleasant platforming exercise #6", "vertical wall jump challenge #2", and "treasure chest room #99". In the traditional metroidvanias, rooms shared a theme, and the experience of traversing them had a rhythm. Not here, the layout makes no physical sense and is absolutely forgettable – and why wouldn't it be? An algorithm placed it. And you know what the worst part is? In the last area, not even the map will help you figure out the traversal, because you get ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ teleporters?? the whole map becomes a disjointed mess to the point that it's borderline useless!


Lastly, some tedium in traversing is fiiiine and expected, ye? This is not my first metroidvania ride. If traversing gets more and more pleasant throughout the game, the sense of progression is awesome. But the movements ablities of this game stop at a basic double jump. Now, I will grant that the double jump is cool, in the last area it allows for some fun platforming with the wall jump. But you never even get a dash, or anything that would truly innovate on the very barebones metroidvania gameplay experience otherwise. And since not only the save points, but also the warp points are placed relatively randomly and without rhythm, this makes traversal sooooo ass.

When I opened this game, I was delighted to find that I had seemingly gotten a really cute metroidvania somewhere along my infinite humble monthly keys, one that I had never heard of before. Unfortunately, the experience just got more and more frustrating as I progressed, and now I'm not even sure if I want to push through the last area. All I can say is, there are good bones on this game: The visuals are awesome, the audio is awesome, the fundamental movement is sound. But some things are not meant to be procedurally generated. And, if nothing else, this game is a perfect case study that will make you appreciate why the map of a good metroidvania is more than a series of rooms.

this is what it feels like to be 30 years old

sorry for the 5-minute review but the intro alone is so rough and unpleasant, it just feels like a tech demo and it's super easy to accidentally click the tutorial away. what i understood from the mechanics absolutely did not feel good though, oof

ayyy this is perfect as a refresher on the series before heading into kh3. Apparently lots of crashes if you have the wrong graphics card, but on my nvidia RTX 2060 it's all good. KH1 still holds up well, Re:COM is eh, but it always was, and I have high expectation for KH2 (in my memory this was awesome 15 years ago lmao) and BBS (played this on an emulator for a bit a while back and it was also cool), but obviously still need to head into those

Unreasonably fun game for basically an extended joke about the CD-I games. A+ metroidvania, A+ cutscenes, just an extremely solid experience that lasts exactly as long as it needs to imho.

the gameplay is a relatively fun and difficult puzzler but the story is the definition of an idiot plot and everyone is on their peak anime behaviour; the discussion of marriage, love, sexuality and fidelity is at face value kinda interesting and unusual for anime but at its core, the plot is completely deranged and the characters are all wankers. still, told in a fun way, so worth experiencing!

the idea is really cute but in its current state it is unfortunately so clunky (and makes SO MANY ANNOYING NOISES that you CANNOT turn off or make more quiet over the rest of the game) that i cannot continue

Good game. Very different from LiS1 in a lot of ways, but a good game.

But: it is an absolute disgrace that none of the dialogue options allow me to say "♥♥♥" to the rednecks

it is very funny that this game is actually fine; just like its predecessor, it's a solid Zombie Shooter (2). It's a bit less ugly than the first one, it actually gives you some story, and shooting the zombies without using a single active brain cell is still as fun as in the first one. I don't know why they went for the most generic ass title, but I guess that's just what it is. A solid Zombie Shooter. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.